'Handful of tyrants' ravaging world: Pope

Pope Leo blasted leaders who spend billions on wars and said the world was "being ravaged by a handful of tyrants", in

unusually forceful remarks in ?Cameroon on Thursday, days after United States President Donald Trump attacked him on social media.

Leo, the first US pope, also decried leaders who used religious language to justify wars and urged a "decisive change of course" in a meeting in the biggest city in Cameroon's anglophone regions, where a simmering conflict going back nearly a decade has left thousands dead.

"The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild," the pontiff said.